Challenges

Challenges Overview:

Inspired by the design of Mike Wesch's ANTH101: Anthropology for Everyone website, we have created six pedagogical challenges for faculty and instructors to tackle as entry points to integrating podcasting into course design and implementation. The challenges are linked below as well as in the site navigation menu.

Engaging authentic audiences by recording and sharing podcast recordings can support students' engaging in authentic capital "D" Discourses (Gee, 2015) as they assume new discipline-specific identities and ways of communicating and being (Gee, 2014). The digitally-networked medium of audio podcasting is particularly apt for college students to connect across otherwise impassible barriers and contexts as they begin to find their place in their programs of study and future career paths (Bjorkland, Jr. et al., 2020), receiving feedback and continuing to explore questions, topics, and perspectives.

While it is not necessary to maintain an ongoing podcast across semester offerings of your courses, there are benefits to leveraging the seasonal and episodic nature of podcasts. Students can produce, publish, and promote episodes as part of larger, collaboratively produced seasons within the context of a course (Norsworth & Herndon, 2020). Additionally, these seasons are archived to spark later seasons produced by new sections of a course.

Podcasting can also serve as an engaging form of storytelling for students within the context of a course. Through storytelling, we express our identities (Mishler, 1999) and podcasting can serve as an informal way for students to tell their stories or elicit stories from others who are relevant to the content and focus of a course (Hatfield, 2018).

If the goals of a course are more aligned with expository writing and composition, podcasting can substitute for traditional essays and formal papers. Organization, preparing, and recording a podcast can and should involve similar compositional criteria as traditional expository writing, such as structural organization, citing information and evidence, etc.; however, podcasts offer unique audio elements that students can intentionally integrate (i.e., music, transitions, sound effects, etc.) to construct and express meaning (Greene, 2018) and develop better understanding of written genres (Qaddour, 2017).

Higher education faculty and instructors are encouraged to explore and complete these teaching and learning Challenges with students as a means of beginning to incorporate podcasting into coursework.

Please share teaching ideas, student podcasts, insights, and even ideas for new Challenges. We will post your shares on our blog!